I used mineral spirts to clean out my truck ac system. (flush) as well as follwed that with brake cleaner and then dry compressed air. (all I had availabnle)
Question. If any trace mineral spirits were left in the system, will these be boiled off when vacuuming with a vacuum pump?
follwed that with brake cleaner and then dry compressed air. (all I had availabnle)
boiled off when vacuuming with a vacuum pump?
Depends on how good your vacuum is, but yes, basically. If you are concerned that a significant amount might be present in (say) a heat exchanger you can speed things up by warming it with a hot air gun. Do you have a gauge on your vacuum pump?
"Stormin Mormon" fired this volley in news:YKFDr.70935$ snipped-for-privacy@news.usenetserver.com:
Except that "mineral spirits" is a generic name for a fairly narrow range of solvents that may or may not contain dissolved higher fractions like non-volatile oils, greases, and paraffins.
Many (not all) hardware store mineral spirits leave a waxy residue upon drying.
follwed that with brake cleaner and then dry compressed air. (all I had av= ailabnle)
e be boiled off when vacuuming with a vacuum pump?
Eventually the volatiles will go, depends on how good a vacuum you can pull. Big question is what the stuff left behind when it evaporated. I recently did my van system, took about 8 hours pumping before vacuum stabilized, 80 degree weather. I'd used some mineral spirits for a flush of some of the parts. Hopefully nothing harmful was left, just a little PAG oil residue.
A 'full' vacuum reading on an inch scale would be the same as the barometer reading, assuming both gauges are accurate, which is very unlikely outside a lab.
My barometer shows 30.56" right now so 28-29" of vacuum wouldn't be very good.
The inch and micron numbers are heights of a column of mercury balanced against gas pressure, relative to either normal air pressure (29" lower) or a perfect vacuum (400 microns higher) depending on how the gauge is made. 400 microns is 0.01".
follwed that with brake cleaner and then dry compressed air. (all I had availabnle)
boiled off when vacuuming with a vacuum pump?
Unfortunately "hope" don't feed the bulldogs. And as you found with the vacuum pump, if any volatiles are left behind they take a long time to boil off and get carried out.
Most people don't bother pulling more than a token hard vacuum, or worse they use one of those air venturi "vacuum pumps" that isn't worth a plug nickel to "evacuate" a car system. And then they don't bother to change out the Filter/Drier and leave the old saturated one in - and wonder why the new compressor goes bad too.
They make special high-purity HVAC System flushing solvents for this purpose and they are formulated specifically to not leave any harmful deposits and to evaporate out quickly. That's NOT the time to start playing "Mister Wizard" and experimenting with the home chemistry set.
There's no rule that inch-graduated gauges have to be crude.
My inch gauge is a Dwyer model 2001 like the top left. It displays the draft of my wood stove:
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One minor division is 0.02" of Water Column, or ~0.0015" (~38 microns) of mercury. So the 600 micron difference would show plainly at around
3/10 of full scale.
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